Webinars, BlogTalkRadio and Sun Microsystems

September 4th, 2008 Rich Taylor

I thought I would follow up to last week’s post on The Jim Rome Show. Writing about radio got me thinking about the new forms of audio media out there today. The first thing that came to mind is satellite radio. I have never paid for the service, but I have friends that annoyingly love it. While satellite radio is great, we all know the MP3 player has been the real game changer in audio media. I am sure there are thousands of thoughts on the web about MP3 players out there, so I will avoid boring you with mine.

For many companies, webinars (or, if you prefer web seminars) and podcasts have been a great way to get your message out. At MySQL (now the Database Group at Sun Microsystems), we have been using webinars to inform our users and to generate leads since 2004. After the Live Webinars take place, we post the recording of the webinar on the website. The basic idea is to provide useful information that our community wants to hear in a format that is interactive. All we ask in return is some general information . Our community gets useful information, we get some information about our community.

After Sun Microsystems bought MySQL I started to look into what Sun is doing as far as podcasts or webinars. I discovered SunRadio on BlogTalkRadio. I have only attended a couple of events and they have been good. It is a great way to get out information and allows interaction. Sun has recently announced a new show called Socially Speaking, a show focused on social media. The first show is today at 3pm PST and features Shel Holtz on Digital Communication. I thought a few people here might be interested.

I like live webinars because you can get involvement from your audience. You will find quickly that any live event needs to be recorded. It seems you can never host a live event and please everyone with the time or the format.

I would love to hear how others use webinars or podcasts to build their community and/or generate leads. Try not to do so many webinars that your collegues start calling you the webinerd (thanks Adam).